Outcast

Daily Challenge Check-in: July 7, 2015

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Words/Time: 3769 words revising “Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 46th meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through just under 13 pages of double-spaced text. That may not sound like much, but there are three of us going over every aspect of this story. It is the most intensive revision I will probably ever do on this book. It’s taken us longer than I’d ever hoped to do this, but we’re around halfway through part 3 of 4, so we’re definitely getting there. And along the way, we’re fixing issues in my story world and solidifying weak characters and plot points. Our average page count for one of these meetings is 5-6, so 13 was great.

The first week of Camp NaNo is over, so here’s a quick update on my progress–my goal for the month is to work for an average of an hour per day on my revision. So far, I’m right on par with that. It’s not nearly as exciting as having a word count to share, but I’m still happy that I haven’t skipped any days for the last week.

The unfortunate truth I have to face now, though, is that I can’t work on “Outcast” equally with “Pithea” this month as I’d hoped. Since my Skype editing group caught up with my own advance editing a month or so ago, I feel like I’m barely keeping ahead. And I need to keep ahead, because I’m making a lot of big changes to areas that I know weren’t good before we get there, so we don’t waste our time on those parts. So for a while, I need to focus only on revising “Pithea” so we don’t run out of material to work on some Tuesday night soon.

Daily Challenge Check-in: July 5, 2015

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Words/Time: 3590 words, revising “Outcast.” I’ve run into one area that will take some rethinking to explain in the new story world. It’s not even something that was related to the game I had been writing fanfiction for. The fun of writing fanfiction (at least for the game I used to write it for) is that you can get away with a lot more than you can when you’re writing what’s meant to be set in more of a real-world setting. Basically, based on a friend’s description of a character he wanted me to include in my story, I wrote about a woman who could become invisible. That part’s not the problem, though, as that is actually a thing in my world. But when she used her trick, she sort of always brought a breeze with her. It was supposed to mask the sound she made moving around, but she was the only one who could do it. Now, I have no way to explain her doing this, and really just need to remove that part. However, it’s incorporated into the scene, and won’t be a simple removal. It’s just one paragraph, though, so for now, I’ve marked it to look at later. I was really flying with my work today and didn’t want to slow down to figure this out.

Daily Challenge Check-in: July 3, 2015

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Words/Time: 2137 words, revising “Outcast.” So far there haven’t been a lot of changes that I’ve had to make, mostly wording differences. Still, I’m going over it with a fine-toothed comb, to make sure I don’t miss anything. I’ve already revised this story several times, so the change in story world is the biggest thing I’m doing. Later on, that change will require a lot more work than here at the beginning.

Daily Challenge Check-in: July 2, 2015

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Words/Time: 1194 words revising “Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 45th meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We got through just over 5 pages of double-spaced text. We had a much shorter than normal meeting today, going only for an hour than the normal 2-2 1/2 hours. But we moved it later in the week too, and I was glad we were still able to get a meeting in this week.

With Camp NaNo going on, I had planned to work on both “Pithea” and “Outcast” every day. Since I knew I’d get plenty of time in for the day’s goal during the Skype meeting, I decided not to push myself to work on “Outcast” today too. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do only “Outcast” to make up for it.

Daily Challenge Check-in: July 1, 2015

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Words/Time: 1 hour & 22 minutes, revising “Pithea” for half and “Outcast” for the other half. “Outcast” is one I have been wanting to work on for a while, but it’s taken a backseat ever since I started work on “Pithea” in 2013. “Pithea” is technically the first book that would need to come out, but “Outcast” is one I wrote 7 years ago as fanfiction, but will need much less rewriting to adapt it to my new story world than anything else I’d written. I don’t have any kind of introduction for it worked up yet, but let me just say that it’s my favorite of anything I’ve ever written. My biggest issue with the adapting so far is how to bring the narrator’s voice into it. I’m not sure if I can do that without forcing it too much.

Camp NaNoWriMo started today, and my goal is to work for around an hour per day, average, throughout the month of July. Because I’ve been anxious to start redoing “Outcast,” I do plan to split that time between that story and “Pithea.” However, I’ll put “Outcast” on the back burner if I need to; we’ll see how it goes.